Facebook Analytics Blog

Bots for Messenger: Adding Analytics Support and FbStart Membership Opportunities

Posted about a year ago

by Sridharan Ramanathan

Since launching the Messenger Platform at F8 in April, businesses and developers have built more than 33,000 bots to engage with people. You've built bots that can accept payments, deliver news and content, share weather updates, confirm reservations at a hotel, send receipts from a recent purchase, and more to help drive personalized, scaled experiences with customers. Inspired by this fast-growing adoption and the feedback we've received, we're offering two new resources to make building and measuring bots for Messenger easier than ever. We're adding analytics capabilities and the eligibility to join our FbStart program.

Facebook Analytics: Bots for Messenger Support

Facebook Analytics is a tool that reaches across mobile and desktop devices, helping businesses measure, understand, and optimize their customers' journey across apps and websites. Starting today, we're extending this analytics support to businesses building bots on the Messenger Platform, becoming among the first analytics solutions for bots in the industry to provide actionable insights and transparency.

With this new free tool, you'll be able to view reports on messages sent, messages received, and people who block or unblock your app — without having to add additional code. In addition, you'll have access to aggregated and anonymized demographic reports such as age, gender, education, interests, country, language, and much more to help you better understand who's engaging with your bots. For bots associated with multiple Pages, you'll be able to filter results at the page-level to view analytics for a specific Page.

Example: bots for Messenger event trend with demographics

Businesses on the Messenger Platform can also use the App Events API to log custom events for Analytics. In doing so, you'll be able to gather deeper insights about how people are engaging with your bots. Some example use cases are:

A travel business can see how often people are transferred to a human agent

A news publisher can see how frequently people click links back to their site

An e-commerce business can build cross-platform funnels to see what percentage of people interact with its bot also make a purchase on its website or app

FbStart to Welcome Bots for Messenger Developers

Beginning today, Messenger Platform developers and businesses can apply for FbStart, Facebook's global program to help early stage mobile startups build & grow their apps. Bots for Messenger developers and businesses accepted into FbStart will receive all the program benefits—including Facebook ads credits and free tools and services from premier partners like Amazon, Dropbox, and Stripe. To learn more about the program, visit: www.fbstart.com.

How to Get Started with Analytics and FbStart Opportunities

To view analytics for your bot, go to your Facebook Analytics dashboard, select your app from the menu, and navigate to the Events tab

To log custom events for more in depth analysis, you can reference the App Events API documentation here

Messenger Platform developers and businesses interested in applying to FbStart can do so here